Neil Gaiman
You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.Collection: Book
That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.Collection: Girl
Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.Collection: Heart
Even if your goose habitually lays golden eggs, it will still be cooked.Collection: Eggs
The Time Lords really didn't like genocide. I'm not too keen on it myself. It's the potential you're killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if...Collection: What If
Leave no path untaken.Collection: Path
Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.Collection: Writing
I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.Collection: Aversion
There are people you do not want to upset in the world - the politically disenfranchized who feel they have nothing to lose, those who feel that the time has come for revolution ... then out on the edges beyond any of those are science fiction fans whose favorite show has been canceled in an untimely way.Collection: People
Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.Collection: Looks
London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.Collection: Cities
The really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.Collection: Important
Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.Collection: Style
Classic authors should be older than I am, and wiser, and on-top of all their deadlines.Collection: Classic
I have world class photographic red-eye pretty much all the time. As a general rule, if it's taken with a flash, I look like I am possessed by the blazing forces of darkness, at least in the eye department.Collection: Taken
Dinner with Steven Moffat in Bar Shu, spent mostly in enthusiastic Dr Who neepery. I love my life....As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's 'Why Don't You Run Linux?' talks are staring to seem much more sensible.Collection: Running
As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.Collection: Book
[I spent] much of my time reminding Matt Groening that I really need to be a head in a jar on Futurama.Collection: Jars
There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.Collection: Rain
I suppose I could claim that I had suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already know the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now I know the truth, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.Collection: Thinking
And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they're meant to.Collection: Following
Don't start anything you're not prepared to finish.Collection: Prepared
Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.Collection: Wise
For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.Collection: Book
As sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.Collection: Life
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.Collection: Believe
I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a small medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.Collection: Country
Diana used to tell me she had a travel jinx, something I only really started to believe when the plane door fell off.Collection: Believe
You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer & the finest friendCollection: Stars
What about volcanoes?" "What about them?" "All that lava comes up from center of the earth where it is all hot. I saw a program, it had David Attenborough, so it's true.Collection: Volcanoes
If you can't eat it, drink it, smoke it, or snort it... then f*ck it!Collection: Drink
How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?Collection: Older Sister
I think I could be a perfectly decent cat. I've been around cats long enough to know what the rules of being a cat are. When all else fails, wash. And I think I could master the thing that cats do, where they stalk away pretending they meant to do whatever it was in the first place; showing their wounded dignity.Collection: Cat
If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him.Collection: Upset
It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.Collection: Heart
No, look, there's a blue box. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it's meant to go. And when it turns up, there's a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed cos he's awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch 'Blink'.Collection: Blue
Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.Collection: Mean
I like 'pencil-necked weasel'. It has 'pencil' in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it's what you call someone when you're worried that using a long word like 'intellectual' may have too many syllables. It's not something that people who have serious, important things to say call other people.Collection: Writing
Friday's a free day. A woman's day.Collection: Friday
And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.Collection: People
The moonlight was enough. It would do.Collection: Enough
The only water in the forest is the River.Collection: Rivers
You shine like a beacon in a dark world.Collection: Dark
I love CGI if it's invisible. I don't like it when it's there and obvious.Collection: Invisible
Books are defensive, not offensive (unless you're the puzzled adult trying to make the kid with the book interact).Collection: Book
Twitter is great and it's glorious and it's easy, but if somebody comes up with something kind of like Twitter tomorrow, that's better or smarter or more useful, in three weeks time, Twitter could more or less be history because that's how fast things go.Collection: Three
I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.Collection: Writing
"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.Collection: Ideas
I once read that you die because you see the Angel of Death, and you fall in love. And you fall in love so hard your soul is sucked out through your eyes, and that's the moment of death. It's a lovely, strange old Jewish legend.Collection: Falling In Love